I use to love a particular bread that they sold at wal-mart made by Oraweat called Oat Nut. It was a wonderful bread with walnuts and sunflower seeds and I just loved it. Well, you guessed it, they stooped carrying it. That’s when I began my quest for the perfect bread recipe.
After a lot of searching and testing different recipes I finally came up with this one and began to modify it until I got it just like the Oraweat Oat Nut bread that I loved so much.
I still fiddle with the recipe from time to time by adding different nuts or substituting whey lefter over from cheese making for the milk and stuff like that but this is it!
We make this about once a week and find it very relaxing and frugal.
You don’t have to add the nuts but we like them in there for that extra bit of crunch.
What you will need:
1.5 lbs bread flour (about 5 cups)
1 tsp active dry yeast
1 tsp salt
4 tsp wheat gluten
1 Tbsp honey
½ cup sunflower seeds
½ cup chopped walnuts
7 oz lukewarm water
7 oz lukewarm milk
1 oz butter at room temperature
flour for dusting
olive oil for greasing bowl
If you have a kitchen aid mixer with the dough hook, use it.
Place first 9 ingredients in mixing bowl with kneading hook and mix for 10 to 12 minutes on lowest speed.
After kneading remove from mixing bowl and place on floured pastry board and fold and knead a few times. Shape dough into a ball.
Put a little olive oil in a large glass bowl and wipe around real good with a paper towel. Wet a kitchen towel, place dough in bowl and cover with damp towel. Turn just your oven light on and place bowl in over with door closed. Let dough rise until double in size. I don’t time this but do check on the dough from time to time; its anywhere from 2 – 2 ½ hours at the most. I have gone longer and it still turned out great. This is important, the more it rises the lighter your bread will turn out.
doubled in size
When the dough has doubled in size punch down and remove from bowl and knead for about 1 minute or so. At this point I like to cut the dough into half and form into loaves. Put each loaf in a bread pan. Place bread bans back in oven (on second to lowest rack) and cover very loosely with a wal-mart bag. Let the dough rise again until the dough is coming over the top of the bread pan and looks like a loaf of bread. Some experimentation will be needed here depending on the size of your bread pans.
Remove bread from oven and pre-heat oven to 360° F. Now bake bread for about 35 – 40 minutes. When bread is removed from the pan you should be able to thump on the bottom of the loaf and it have a hollow sound. Enjoy!
our daily bread
